First spammy comment

Yesterday, this blog received its first spammy comment. Marcus left a note regarding a post published last month when my email address won the UK National Lottery. I guess he just wanted to suggest new outlets for my address's gambling addiction.


Sorry, Marcus, this blog will not be a promotional platform for your online casinos. Interestingly enough, though, this comment is somewhat relevant to the post to which it was destined. Also, Marcus and co did not attempt at flooding all my other posts with the same type of comment. Good effort! This is in keeping with this older post described, by the way.

To this day, I have been restricting comment posting to "registered users", i.e. people willing to identify themselves using a Google, LiveJournal, WordPress, TypePad, AIM or OpenID account. I also chose to enable word verification (a step which is automatically skipped if you signed in as a blog author, apparently). Last but not least, I set my comment moderation settings to "always" and get notified by email each time someone leaves a comment.

On various occasions, while trying to leave a comment, the whole identification and word verification process struck me as cumbersome and frustrating. Since Marcus's comment only got caught at the comment moderation stage, why not make it easier altogether for normal people to share their thoughts in the comments section?

Let's give it a try: I just changed my settings to allow anyone to post comments to my blog. If I get flooded with spammy comments (which you will hopefully never get to see), I'll switch back to more restrictive settings.

Acrostics, mesostics and trash metal

If you are still unclear as to what an acrostic is, the first two sentences of the definition given by Wordsmith.org (found here on Answers.com) may help dissipate any remaining ambiguity:

An acrostic is not an angry insect ("a cross tick"), any more than an oxymoron is a big dumb cow. Rather, an acrostic is a poem, in which the first letter of each line spells out a word.

This definition actually debunks two deeply rooted assumptions that I had concerning dictionaries:

• Isn't it unusual for a dictionary to start defining a word by what it does not mean?
• Would you have ever thought it possible to turn to a dictionary for comic relief? I thought humor — if at all present — could only reside in the citations used to illustrate the definition of a word in context.

This may just be that Wordsmith.org is not a conventional dictionary. As refreshing as it may be, this definition could be amended a little. Poems are indeed the preferred embodiment for acrostics, because of their mostly fixed layout, but Arnold Schwarzenegger's letter can be added to a long line of texts in prose which benefit from a two-dimensional reading. Among the more elegant and recent is Linton Weeks's farewell review in the Washington Post.

In both examples, the "hidden" message was meant to be discovered by everyone. A variant of the acrostic and a more effective cryptographic pattern is the mesostic, which also has you look for subtext by reading the text vertically. While acrostics rely on the first letter of each line, mesostics use the middle of each line.

Do you remember how we were supposed to be able to hear the voice of the devil by playing trash metal tracks backwards?

More f-words

The letter F seems to be particularly prone to open profane words in English. While Arnold Schwarzenegger recently chose to use one common f-word (see this post), Louis Nicollin seems to favor the one ending in "-ag".

Readers from outside France will ask: who the hell is Louis Nicollin??? He's the CEO of one of the biggest garbage collection companies in France and the president of the Montpellier soccer team. Also, he's (hopefully) one-of-a-kind foul-mouthed homophobic and sexist character! Last month, he insulted another team's captain (using his favorite f-word), and proved with his next-day attempt at an apology that it is sometimes best to not apologize at all.

Judging from this article published in Le Monde, the guy is a constant PR disaster. Allow me to select a couple of gems for you and provide a translation into English for your enjoyment:

"On peut se parler, se dire les choses. On est des hommes, pas des gonzesses."
We can talk, say what we have to say to each other. We're guys, not chicks.

"Un clip sur le racisme, je suis prêt à le passer dès demain matin. Mais sur l'homophobie... Après, ce sera quoi, les femmes battues ?"
A video about racism, I'm ready to show it as early as tomorrow morning. But one about homophobia... What is it going to be next? Battered women?

"Si la maire me demande de le passer, je le ferai. Mais je préférerais montrer des filles à poil...".
If the mayor asks me to show it, I'll do it. But I'd rather show naked girls...

Ahh, free speech...

Spiderman's pedipalps

If you're wondering what pedipalps are (not what they stand for here, obviously), the Merriam-Webster online dictionary gives the following definition:

either of the second pair of appendages of an arachnid (as a spider) that are borne near the mouth and are often modified for a special (as sensory) function

The appendage, according to the Wikipedia article, is also where the male spider's reproductive organs are located, which makes it relevant in the context of your average spam message.


Considering what one looks like with enlarged pedipalps (see above), though, it is safe to say that you and your family can pass on this and save.

Yay, jsem získala loterie znovu!

Please pardon my broken Czech again.

For those of us not versed in Slavic languages, freetranslation.com provides the following "translation" of the UK National Lottery message I wrote about earlier this week (see this post):

"Your e-mail address he won This is oficiálne notify that the result our pocítace cerpat 844 this on the chosen your name and e-mail address pripojen to tickets Císlo 034-22478556 with poradovým císlem 129, which subsequently won the United Kingdom Lottery large udelování prices in the category. You have been confirmed as vítez category B in the United Kingdom Lottery vylosuje pocítac remíz. Your claim ensemble was rádne predána to this Narodni with the guidelines, which we during handling of prevodem your price 1,000000.00 £ GBP. (One Million United Kingdom pound) to your úcet nominated. Laskave sent the following information of the claims."

I really like the disclaimer accompanying this appalling text:

This translation is ideal for "gisting" purposes, providing a basic understanding of the original text.

Of course, since I don't know any Czech, I may be too quick to blame freetranslation.com, which does indeed provide basic understanding of the message — which I am grateful for. But, as far as I know, "which we during handling of prevodem your price 1,000000.00 £ GBP. (One Million United Kingdom pound) to your úcet nominated" is nothing more than gibberish.

As is often the case, you get what you pay for...

Yay, jsem získala loterie!

I was informed by the following email that I finally won the lottery!

UK NATIONAL LOTTERY

Vaše e-mailová adresa Vyhrál To je oficiálne oznámit, že výsledek našeho pocítace cerpat 844 tohoto dne zvolený Vaše jméno a e-mailovou adresu pripojen k vstupenek Císlo 034-22478556 s poradovým císlem 129, které následne vyhrál Velká Británie Lottery velkou udelování cen v 2. category. You mít bylo potvrzeno, že vítez kategorie B ve Spojeném království Lottery vylosuje pocítac remíz. Vaše tvrzení soubor byl rádne predána k tomuto kancelár s pokyny, které jsme se pri manipulaci s prevodem Vaší cenu 1,000000.00 £ GBP. (One Million Velká Británie libra) na Váš úcet nominován. Laskave poslat níže informace o pohledávky.

Oh no, actually, it's my email address that had the winning ticket. It's been having quite a bit of a gambling problem lately and I've been trying to talk it out of staying up so late playing at multiple online poker tables at once. It recently started buying UK Lotto tickets through a Czech bookmaker, and it seems to be paying off after all! One million British pounds! Yooohooooooooo.

Wait, I hope my email address is willing to share... After all I did for it, trying to keep it spam free and all, it should at least be a couple hundred thousand grateful, don't you think?

Seriously, why would the UK national lottery write to me in Czech???

Poetry on the margin

I doubt the poetic figure called acrostic has ever had more exposure in the press than these past few days. Thanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger, of all people, acrostics are now all the rage — kind of.

Google trends shows a surge in the number of Google searches as well as news articles about acrostics in the last week of October:

This sudden interest for the poetic figure coincides with the Governor of California's f-bomb, cleverly hidden in a veto letter addressed to the Members of the California State Assembly, among whom Assemblyman Tom Ammiano. In turn, Ammiano encapsulated a coded message in his response to the governor ("A Message on the Margin"). Is that the beginning of a new mind game for political writers?

The following graph shows that the trend setter and his message are still 6 times "trendier" than the form used to convey it.

The revival of acrostics may well be short lived...

"Be the Tasmanian Lovemaking Devil..."

To be honest, I didn't know Tasmanian devils made the ideal lover.

Judging from real world pictures (see above) and from the general features of the animal's incarnation in the Looney Tunes cartoon (see below), I am tempted to believe that they are to be avoided at all costs. In fact, "lovemaking" and "Tasmanian devil" sound so far apart that combining them in a single noun phrase should normally be considered oxymoronic — unless of course the attributes of the ideal lover (or even the basic traits commonly expected in a tolerable partner) dramatically changed with the most recent partial lunar eclipse.

Viciousness and aggressivity on the one hand, tornado-style destruction and utter stupidity on the other — is this really something to be looking forward to???

Summer is watch season for everybody after all

This is an erratum to my previous post (Summer time is watch season), in which "losers" were denied the privilege of buying a tacky watch from a dubious website. Well, it turns out that I was mistaken, and that self-identified losers too deserve to fall for that!

See the last line of this screenshot of my spam folder, featuring a sample of the watch related spam I received:

"Our watch will look great even on any loser"

Hurray for non discriminatory, equal opportunity scams!

Summer time is watch season

All of a sudden, over the summer, I got flooded with spam wanting to sell me a watch. Watches seemed to be the new pills.

The pitch typically went like this:

With our [select your style] watches, [select who you are] will look [select your desired look]. Buy our [select your style again] watches, they are [select your price range].

With the following options to choose from:

[select your style]
stunning
trendy
designer
stylish
classy
fashionable
cool
luxury, luxurious

[select who you are]
a local or international customer
a teenager
an adult
a loser

[select your desired look]
irresistible look
look great
proud
stylish
classy
trendy

[select your price range]
low-priced
cheap
great savings
very low price

Summer has passed, and so has the wave of watch related emails. I wonder what the fall's fad will be.

Hotmail passwords

Oooops. Not clear how all this happened, though... A phishing scam able to fool 10,000 users at once sounds fishy.

Antithesis

Rxpills_support_online makes the following claim:

"Impotence is not good. Viagra is Good"

Therefore impotence is not Viagra, right? Er, no, that probably isn't where this was going...

I love it when the argumentation reaches that level of simplicity but can still be described using very elaborate-sounding words. Viva la abstracción!

Polysemy, ambiguity and spam recipes

Once in a while, I check my mail sent to my Gmail account using the online interface. I generally go directly to the spam folder to make sure that the spam filter has not been over-zealous, and sometimes just for laughs.

Some advertising makes it through my default Adblock Plus config but what keeps me from blocking the frame is the (certainly limited but not non-existent) entertainment value of this sponsored links section. Most of the text ads deemed "contextually" relevant to the mail classified as spam have to do with unsolicited mail. Some, however, are pretty much off target and that makes them way more interesting: the relevance computation is evidently based on "spam" construed as gelatinous mystery/porky meat.

Spam Confetti Pasta
French Fry Spam Casserole
Spam Vegetable Strudel
Spam Veggie Pita Pockets
Spicy Spam Kabobs
Savory Spam Crescents
Spam Primavera
Spam Imperial Tortilla Sandwiches
Spam Fajitas
Spam Skillet Casserole
Spam Quiche
Spam Hashbrown Bake
Ginger Spam Salad

Yikes.

Resolving ambiguity originating in polysemy is no easy task. And yet, one could assume that the engine used by AdSense to process keywords and calculate ad relevance would know what "spam" means when it is a label associated by Gmail itself to an electronic message, don't you think?

Synaesthetic

Last week, Zimbolli sent me a message entitled "synaesthetic", which Thunderbird classified as Junk. Attracted by the unusually learned subject line, I did open the message body, only to find the not-so-unusual male enhancement promises and the following URL:

www[dot]pill22[dot]com

Isn't it ironic that a spammer would try to make it difficult for a robot (and to some extent for a human being) to figure out the website they are rooting for? Usually, it's email addresses you disguise by spelling out the dots, not URLs.

Anyway, while idly looking around for examples of synesthesia in poetry (Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire first came to my mind, but I was looking for examples in English), I stumbled upon something I had never heard about in all those years I spent studying/playing early music: the "ocular harpsichord" and the "color organ". It turns out that sound and light shows are not a 20th century invention at all! Jean-Michel Jarre's musical family tree includes people like Telemann or Rameau (late 17th-18th centuries), who wrote pieces for keyboard instruments capable of producing sound and light to go with the sound. Of course, it's not like musicians until then had ignored the emotional power of simultaneous sensory perceptions from different sources (auditory and visual in this case), but I thought it was interesting that it would be synthesized in a single instrument.

Something that I surely must have heard about in all the years I spent studying literary theory and cultural history but just "re-"discovered is Newton's theory of color and music. The theory compares the vibrations resulting in the different color shades on the spectrum and the vibrations resulting in the different musical notes in Western scales. It is schematized in the color wheel, published in Opticks in 1704, on which you can see letters corresponding to a Dorian mode scale starting on D separating the sectors displaying the spectral colors.

Many thanks to Zimbolli (or whoever that was) for piquing my interest and for reminding me that Google, YouTube and Wikipedia are my friends.

Customer service

Dijon1 sent me the following email the other day:

In large print:

You're a jerk You are sleeping on your working place? Visit Canadian Health and Care Mall

I assume the email provided a way to reach that online pharmacy, but I did not feel inclined to inquire further after such a welcoming greeting.

About.com has compiled a list of eight rules for good customer service, specially targeted at small businesses in Canada. Dijon1, may I point you to rule #6? A corollary to this rule would be: "Don't insult your potential customers", and it should also apply to yourself, not just to your staff.

Swex From a Chriistian Perspective

Despite Faber's pseudo-proselytizing or in any case spammy attempt, the email remained unopened and went directly to trash. From what I could gather, though, the aforementioned perspective cometh wiith quiite a fjew twypos.

Interestingly, the Open Office dictionary for American English offers more alternative spellings than its British counterpart.

Here's the dialog box with the suggestions for American English:



Here's the same dialog box with the "English (UK)" option selected:



Why is that???

Studying? Why bother?

In the 10+ years that I worked in the higher education sector, it never occurred to me that bribery was a skill students could practice in school and actually use to advance from year to year and eventually graduate with a degree. By this, I mean that it didn't cross my mind even once that anyone among my co-workers was ever likely to take—or even receive—a bribe. Also I'm pretty sure that if anything like a bribe had ever been suggested by a student, they would have immediately been reported and the student would have been in for a very unpleasant chat with the members of the disciplinary board...

But maybe I'm naive.

I did receive letters and emails from students. Typically they would ask me to allow them to submit a mid-term paper even though they had been too busy to come to school after week 1, or they would beg me to give a couple of extra marks to their term paper so they would not have to repeat the class. However, those letters never suggested that their authors were ready to give me anything in exchange for a favor that, in any case, I was never ever going to grant them.

So, when once in a while an email like the following somehow caught my attention, I'd dismiss it as yet another scam:

WHAT A GREAT IDEA!

We provide a concept that will allow anyone with sufficient work experience to obtain a fully verifiable University Degree.

Bachelors, Masters or even a Doctorate.

For US: 1.845.709.8044
Outside US: +1.845.709.8044

"Just leave your NAME & PHONE NO. (with CountryCode)" in the voicemail.

Our staff will get back to you in next few days!

What a great idea indeed! It looks like a similar "concept" has been put in practice in Toulon, France. I don't think "sufficient work experience" was even a pre-requisite. A nice fat bundle of banknotes was, instead. See here (Le Monde article, in French), or here (France 24 article, in English).

Despicable.

Ever heard of email obfuscation??

I just found out that the institution I (used to) work for has created a contact page for me, exposing my (old-but-still-in-use) professional email address in plain HTML! They just refactored the whole website—for the better—and could have taken a minute to think about email harvesters and their spammer friends. Their mail server is already almost choking to death with unsolicited mail, but they thought it would be a good idea to invite more spam to the party. Tss.

The easy way to advertise your email address on a webpage is to enclose it in an a href HTML tag with a mailto directive, like this:

< a href="mailto:your.login@your.domain-name.com" >Send me spam!< \a > (without the non-breaking spaces)

The syntax is fairly simple. Check out this site at the University of Nebraska (among others) if you'd like to see how you can fill out the subject field of the message or specify multiple recipients (more people to send spam to, yay!).

This is all very nice, but it means a very simple crawler can open the page to suck out your email address and have some fun with it. Note that the site I just pointed you to has the following recommendation:

"It is recommended that you use a process other than MailTo [to] handle the e-mail process from your web site." [quoted from here]

The process the site is mentioning is a way to display your email address without having it exposed in plain HTML and lying around for everyone to see. This process is called obfuscation. Of course, crawlers will eventually learn how to read through the obfuscating code and run away with your email address, but why give out the info they're looking for right away when you can keep it protected for a little longer?

There are lots of clever ways to obfuscate an email address. From what I've seen, there are three types of approaches.

• Some advocate encoding the content of the HTML tag, using Unicode code points (m would be U+006D), for instance, or numeric character references (m = &# 109;). This solution is certainly a good deterrent for the human eye, but I doubt a bot would have much trouble figuring out how to read the string. (Incidentally, the email address encoder at the University of Nebraska is called Spam-me-not!)
• The second solution implies using a script to scatter the information needed to reconstruct your email address dynamically (this information can be encoded too!). Here again, lots of people are publishing their own solution, but I thought this one was particularly interesting (simple and readable). However, even if harvesters can't process javascript, they can try their luck at assembling the bits of information contained in the script and see if they obtain a valid email address...
• The best solution, then, is probably a site-wide rewrite of email addresses, like the one Roel Van Gils proposes on A List Apart (scroll down to the Putting it together section).

What do you think? How far should webmasters go to protect the email addresses you can find on their websites?

The weight of bulk and junk mail

We just got back from three weeks away from home. In order to avoid letting our mailbox overflow while we were away, we used the Hold Mail service offered by the US Postal Service. Thanks to that free service, your mail does not get delivered but accumulates at your local post office until you pick it up in person or request it to be delivered again as normal.

Here's a picture of what awaited us:



I separated the wheat from the chaff and was appalled by how much bulk mail and junk mail there was compared to normal, legitimate mail. To get a sense of that, I weighed each pile of mail:

• about 320 grams (11+ oz) of regular mail (mostly bills)

• a little under 1400 grams of bulk and junk mail (1.4 kilos, or 3 lb 1.4 oz!!)

Over the time we were away, we received three times more bulk and junk mail than legitimate mail. The second pile went directly to the recycle bin. What a waste of paper...

First swine flu spam email?

Today, I received my first swine flu related spam email (see previous post on the subject). Frobuck E. Acho sent me a message with the title "Office is on quarantine". The body of the mail is faking a health newsletter published by some health institution in California.

That institution, Jbibjhj Health (or is it Gueaami Health, as the "copyright" line suggests?), claims to be located in the city of Zevovumah, CA, which, as it happens, doesn't even exist. So where is that office really located? All the links point to websites in China...

No office, no quarantine.

Niftier web users, niftier spammers

The Language Log recently posted an article about the spammy comments they receive and have to filter out.

What struck me, apart from the volume of spam they get, is that, according to Arnold Zwicky, who's in charge of sorting through the spam at the Language Log, spammers have started putting in a little more effort to sound remotely legitimate. They are going one step further than before and need to perform some data mining to identify and pass for someone from the online linguistics community.

I like the fact that they're trying to impersonate people like John Wells! For those of you who have no clue who John Wells is, he's the author of the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, a little bible I used to tote every time I had a phonology class to teach -- until I decided to spare my back and switch to the other bible and its convenient DVD: the English Pronouncing Dictionary by Daniel Jones. Anyway, John Wells is a very active and highly respected figure in the field of phonetics, phonology and linguistics in general.

Back to my point regarding spam: this new trend probably means that people are more careful before they choose to click on a link, and that spamming is becoming a more difficult job.

Swine flu spam outbreak?

Newspapers are reporting that the swine flu pandemic is giving spammers new fodder to pig out on. See this article from the McAfee Avert Lab Blog, for example.

So far, my inbox has managed to stay safe:

Hope your spam filter doesn't need to wear a mask.

What's with my couch??

Recently, spammers have been very concerned about my couch.

Rubin: "heave your belove couch adventures"
Roscoe: "support your belove couch experience"
Jacklyn: "uplift your sweet couch experience"
Marilin: "ascent your lover couch experience"
Rosendo: "boost your couch experience"

Is it the type of experience you can mention in your resume, alongside your plow experience? 15+ years of couch experience. Somehow, I doubt it... The imperatives kind of give away what this is all related to. "Ascent" is the odd man out, here, grammatically speaking, but conveys the same idea as the verbs.

Out of curiosity, and to expand my knowledge of the English language, I looked up "to heave" on the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. It turns out it's been around since before the 12th century, has both irregular and regular inflicted forms, and several meanings and synonyms, among which another word we don't see everyday: "to retch".

Did anyone puke on my couch?!?!

How to protect yourself from spam when registering on a website

Access to information on the web is not as open, free and anonymous as one may think. How many times a day do you need to sign in to get to what you need or want? Making a plane or train ticket reservation, leaving a comment on a newspaper article or blog post, viewing your nephew's first birthday pictures on some picture sharing site, reading some article on pink eye on a medical site... all of these may require you to identify yourself. When signing up for a service on a website, you will most probably be asked for a username, a valid email address, and a password to access the service you are signing up for or to modify the information you have provided. As a follow up to last week's post, here are a couple of tips to help you keep your spam folder as thin as possible and protect yourself from private information dissemination.

• Username:

Unless you want to make yourself known as yourself, like maybe on LinkedIn or Facebook or on professional websites, there probably is no need to give out your real name in a firstname_lastname type combo. It is customary on forums and on "geek" websites, for example, to use a nickname. It doesn't need to be the one your grandpa gave you when you were little. Since your username will end up being the name you go by on that website, you may want to keep it bearable to go by and avoid stuff like "mofo99". Of course, there is no need to systematically hide yourself and be over-protective of your identity. It's simply a matter of deciding where and when it is appropriate for an online service, its administrators and fellow users (or for anyone else for that matter) to know your real name.

• Email address:

Create a separate email address that you can enter as your contact address on registration forms. Why give someone you don't know the address you give to your friends, or the one you give to your professional contacts? If needed, create filters to automatically forward legitimate correspondence to your main email address. In any case, keep your main email address as private and spam-free as possible by not using it to register to any online service. This is obviously one tip I ignored when I registered on the site that got hacked. There are lots of options out there to create the address you will be using to sign up for stuff online. You should be able to find what you're looking for in this list of the Top 17 Free Email Services, compiled by about.com. What about your password? Let's deal with that later! Do you have other strategies when you register on a website and need to provide a username and email address? Do you think I am being paranoid?

Hacked website leads to spam surge

Last month, one website of which I was a registered member got hacked. The hackers somehow managed to find a way in, got their hands on the phpBB user table and published everybody's username, email address and password for everyone to see on some other website. I guess this is the risk you take when you give out any information about yourself on the internet...

I don't care about my username or my password being advertized as they are now, because they have little to do with anything confidential. As a matter of fact, I had given a very simple password when I signed up, which I had never used anywhere else and which was only intended to be used on that site.

I have however been foolish enough to use one of my main email addresses as my contact address and am now reaping the fruits of my stupidity. This address had not been spam-free, of course, but it has clearly seen a surge in the number of unwanted messages since the hacking incident.

period	total	daily average	daily min	daily max
before	63	3.94	1	8
after	165	10.31	5	20

Over the 16 days prior to the incident, I received a total of 63 spam emails, with a daily average of a little under 4, a minimum of 1 and maximum of 8. Over the 16 days after the incident, the total amount of spam messages reached 165, with a daily average of about 10, a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 20. As a result of my stupidity, I am now receiving about 160% more spam overall than before (and counting, presumably).

Above is a chart of the daily spam activity recorded on my compromised address just before and just after the hacking incident. Can you guess when the user table information got published?

April Fools take spam seriously

Ever wondered what would happen if you replied to that Nigerian prince who needed help to transfer his hard-earned AIG bonus? GMail is now offering to do it for you, so you can focus on earning your bonus.

Google just announced the Autopilot feature, available for both email and instant messaging. The Autopilot will respond to any email or instant message for you!

And this is not your standard auto-respond feature, delivering the same message to everybody. The text produced will be relevant to the context of the message it is responding to, like with Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA program (which could give you a free shrink session -- check it out here if you have no idea what I'm talking about). Also, one crucial feature of Autopilot is that it will try to emulate your communication style:

You can adjust tone, typo propensity, and preferred punctuation from the Autopilot tab under Settings. (source: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html)

Too bad it's too good to be true!

Dangling legs and stomachs

Another puzzling email subject line sent my mind wandering the other day: "jambes et ventres qui pendent" (literally, legs and stomachs that dangle).

Mm, what an exciting image... I tried to erase it from my mind, but somehow it lingered long enough to find an embodiment in Dali's melting watches in The Persistence of Memory.

Thank God, Doisneau's Two Brothers came next and the dangling legs took on a playful dimension.

The evocative power of words is everywhere, even in spam. Diets and rejuvenation programs, be gone!

"Sire, sire, on en a gros"

I have a .fr email address on which I receive a fair share of spam written in French. I very rarely open the messages, but my attention is sometimes caught by intriguing or outright funny subject lines.

I thought I might share the latest one I got, which somehow made it through my various spam filters. The title reads: "l'avoir gros" (literally, "to have it big"). Here you may ask: what on earth could the pronoun refer to? Something with the masculine gender and in the singular. Your nose, your butt, your stomach??? Look no further. No need to pretend you don't know what the pronoun stands for here...

If I had opened the message before tossing it with the rest, I would probably have stripped it of much of its intriguing quality. As it is, the title brings to my mind two "cultural" references.

The first one is Hamlet. Is this email by a secret admirer of Shakespeare's character. Is s/he thinking out loud and reaching out to share with me an introspective soliloquy on what it means to have it big, whatever it is. On a lighter note, the second reference, which inspired this post's title, is Kaamelott, a spoof of the tales of the knights of the round table. In one episode (season 2, episode 3), two of the dumbest knights knock on King Arthur's door in the middle of the night. They want to voice their discontent and tell the king they think they are being exploited. Their protest slogan is the following: "on en a gros !". This literally does not mean much, other than something like "we have it big" or simply "it is big", maybe. The phrase appears to be a truncated version of "on en a gros sur la patate" (literally something like "we have it big on the potato", the potato figuratively referring to the speaker's face), possibly merged with "on en a marre" (we've had enough). The video of the episode has unfortunately been taken off youtube, but you can still find it legally on wideo.fr (from France only, though, apparently) or less legally in many other places I'm sure.

Which reference is closest to the content of that message? Who knows...

Job-offer spam

More preying on people's credulity and helplessness. I came across this recent article by an AP reporter today. With the unemployment rate here in California about to reach 10%, the pool of people likely to fall for such scams is sadly getting bigger and bigger. Spam us not... please.

Institutional snail spam: A daily statement from your bank??

Not so long ago (ok, maybe more than 10 years ago), the banking branch of the French postal service would send you a statement by mail every time you made a transaction with your credit card. So you ended up receiving more mail from them than from anyone else you knew. Then they probably figured it was:

1. costly and not environment-friendly, since they had to pay for postage (or at least pay their employees to print out the statement, sort it and deliver it), for the paper, and for the energy needed to ship the statement to the right address;
2. annoying, since you were literally flooded with paper;
3. counter-productive, since it gave more work to do to the postal workers while bringing very little value to the customers who ended up not even opening their mail.

Somewhere along the way, the postal service decided to stop sending their customers daily statements and put an end to that form of institutional spam (incidentally, the banking branch of the postal service is now a separate entity).

Some people probably miss that type of correspondence, and the postal service itself the self-imposed work load. Fortunately, now that a lot of (most of) our communication is done electronically, they seem to have secured other sources of revenue. Among the most sustainable ones is delivering paper advertising, considering the proportion of ads we get in the mail...

I feel that spam has sort of filled this slot, except for a number of things:

1. the medium has changed: spam now also comes directly to your virtual mail box or to your cell phone;
2. the flooding has taken gigantic proportions if we combine all sources of unwanted communication (other people will tell you the extent to which it is clogging the series of tubes);
3. the content has become more varied even though certain topics seem to be all-time favorites. Among those are personal enhancement, banking transactions, urgently needed medical care, over-the-counter or prescription drugs, software updates and bargains of various types;
4. the identity of the send has also diversified: now you have a lot more special friends who think you want to hear from them.

The funny thing is that, since the French postal service has become an email provider, you can still get your daily fix of spam through them, if not from them.

Spam me not... please

No, keep it coming actually. It's a lot of fun. Sometimes.